 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Kevin Chatskamer, who's the Vice President of Service Rider Strategy and Solutions with Dell EMC. Kevin, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background. You know, what brought you to the Dell family attack company? Sure, absolutely. So I've been in the service provider industry supporting and working with service providers, gosh, about 20 years. Working in areas, first at the launch of two G mobile data services, three G, four G. Now we're at the advent of five G. And during the entire time, what we've continued to witness continued move away from proprietary, more towards open technologies. Obviously moving away from proprietary hardware, appliances, more towards x86 based appliances, the networking stacks moving more and more open. And in the last 18 months during my journey here at Dell EMC, it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation to their own operations. Yeah, that's a great background. We had a great, Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns talking about networking. We've been watching the open networking piece. But we haven't gotten into all the Gs as much. So, you know, explain to our audience, you know, we've got interop down the street, you know, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but you know, five G, some of the standards are there, some of the things going to sort out. These time fit transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? I think, you know, if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV. And at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the networks needed to train drastically, right? So we saw some of that start to happen. When we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there. I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center for interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement, but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead from taking some of the technology as we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really see them move to scaled operation. So you mentioned a lot of the telco space in this environment. I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship of the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? Yeah, I think when Dell technology speaks about the four transformations, we talked about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, and security transformation, I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability is an area that we work very closely with the telcos and SVs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small medium business will be recognized through service providers through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. So Kevin, can you provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? In the enterprise, we can see VMware, NSX and we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need but there's still a lot of work to go to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you're at Mobile World Congress and just about any trade show event and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. And I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute but I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. So if we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM, SoftLayer, various others have really been built. They've been built around a model that to achieve efficiency and scale, you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now, it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitters too high, it's a little bit too unpredictable. So I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the networks is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues, it can sit at the cell site, it can sit in the mobile backhaul network, it can sit at central office locations and I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of not necessarily if you build it, they will come model the recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around and we'll see the edge become the new cloud. So as we talk about NFV, the edge, share some light, like what would the CPE device look like at the edge? Is that NFV running on the customer's virtualized infrastructure? Is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? What clear picture are hold for the edge? So the answer is yes, right? So the answer is it's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise-prem, right? And Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our virtual edge platform family of products with the first platform being the virtual edge platform 4600, right? The industry's first Skylake D platform specifically targeting the access and branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in these central office locations, the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur, right? And that modular servers that include x86 and merchant silicon and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads like Cloud RAN and smart NICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPUs start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward, the end goal of the programmability that we talk about both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer means that the boundaries between what's a server and what's a network device really start to blur. Kevin, last question I have for you. When I talk to server fighters, it feels like they're being pulled from both sides. So on the one side, there's public cloud, lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work integrate into those services for VMware's partnering with them on that. On the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. Massive footprint and so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? Yeah, and I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an or mindset. Is it this or this? Do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors? And I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an end environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place it's a business model. And I think that what we actually see is even extending that thought a little further is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places. We're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. Kevin, really appreciate you help giving us some insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. This is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE.